I took a day’s holiday from work today as we had things to do in the morning. We had finished all of the important things we had to do by late morning, so we took the opportunity to get the kids out into the garden to harvest some soft fruits. We have several plum trees in and around our garden that are laden with ripe plums. In truth there are too many, they are mostly self-seeded and are too close together.

A plum tree laden with ripe fruit: one of several in our garden

Lately when I’ve been working in the garden they’ll be a small thudding sound every five minutes or so, the thudding of a ripe plum falling from a tree. So one of our jobs today was to get the kids harvesting some plums. They loved this job, especially since most of the plums are out of their reach, so we put them on our shoulders so they could get at the higher ones.

Once we had collected a large bowl of plums we moved on to the other soft fruits growing on the borders of the vegetable patch that we couldn’t bring ourselves to remove when we were clearing the area. There are two of these: an elder tree and some blackberry bushes. We have plans for our blackberries and just to give us a head start I went out foraging in my lunch break on Wednesday. So we only needed to collect about 250g of blackberries with the children this morning.

All from the borders of the vegetable patch – great fun for adults and younger helpers alike!

Within a few minutes we had collected enough blackberries and all of the ripe elderberries. So we and our purple-fingered little helpers headed back to the house via the pumpkin patch, where we collected some ripe courgettes, and the patio where we picked some ripe tomatoes. Whilst we were in the patio we also got the kids harvest the potatoes we had growing in grow bags on the patio.

Courgettes from the pumpkin patch and tomatoes from the patio

My nan got the potato tubers in the post from a newspaper promotion and gave them to us just before we moved into this house in early May. By the time we had unpacked them they had chitted in their packaging, so we put them straight outside. Three and a bit months later and today we ate some for dinner. Needless to say the kids had great fun getting up to their elbows in soil looking for them.

That’s all folks! The entirety of the 2015 potato harvest.

So that’s all of the potatoes harvested now. We’ll probably aim for a larger crop next year. This year we moved into this house late in the growing season and didn’t know how much space we had to cultivate until we moved in. Even then we had so much to do what with unpacking, going to work and the other garden jobs that I’m ecstatic with what we have achieved.

All in all the time spent in the garden today was great fun for all involved. When we got in we set to work on preserving some of our harvest, but that’s for another post! There are still plenty more plums and blackberries for future adventures, so I’ve been reading my books on preserves for ideas. We should really be self-sufficient in preserved fruits this winter!